


and soon it will be morning

by sexyrevolutionaries (whenthesunhasset)



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst, I guess???, M/M, Memory Loss, so many wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-01
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-10 18:44:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1163185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whenthesunhasset/pseuds/sexyrevolutionaries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>daylight,<br/>i must wait for the sunrise,<br/>i must think of a new life,<br/>and i mustn't give in.<br/>when the dawn comes,<br/>tonight will be a memory too,<br/>and a new day will begin</p><p>life after life, they find each other, they love each other, but most importantly, they remember. until they don't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and soon it will be morning

**Author's Note:**

> the lyrics in the summary are from the song memory from the musical cats.
> 
> the idea behind this comes from a post by tumblr user grantairings
> 
> this was written in a few hours with approximately way too much caffeine and way too little sleep so sorry for any mistakes!

It’s been many centuries, many lifetimes, but Grantaire has never forgotten their first. He’s not sure what the year was—how could he? It’s been dozens of lifetimes since. But he remembers a barricade and love and blood, so much blood, but above all, he remembers the smile that lit up his dark journey into the next night.

 ---

The next time they meet, they’re in Italy and there’s another war at their doorsteps, there always is, with Enjolras, and it’s lives like this one where he wonders how he expected anything different. In his next life, he’ll learn that he fought alongside his lover—for he was, once again, his lover in this life—in the American Civil War. It’s been so long that he scarcely remembers exactly what they fought for; something for the good of the people, something that would free them from oppression (if he bothered to learn his history, he’d know they fought to abolish slavery and died for it. It would seem that supporting a cause so Union-esque in the slave-filled South was just as destructive an idea as their last one. It would seem they never learned.).

Maybe, in some life, he’ll take some time off from his endless searching for his golden Apollo and read up on all these wars, these rebellions, these infamous events that all seem to blur together through the passing of time, but he has the future for that, and besides, in this life, Enjolras is much more physically loving than the last, and Grantaire feels as if it’ll all go away if he so much as blinks.

Grantaire feels as if he should question it, question how he has this whole previous life in his head, these memories of a life he, by all logic, never lived. But he did live it. Reincarnation, it seems, has taken at least his beloved group of well-meaning revolutionaries into its grip and has decided to spit them out together, and for that fact alone he is greatful. Enjolras remembers him, his friends remember him, and, when the gunshots ring out through the yard and leave him bleeding out at the only man who Grantaire ever believed in’s feet, he knows if he looks up he’ll find the same smile that graced his eyes before he died in post-revolutionary France smiling down at him, even as the hand clasped tightly in his slackens and grows cold. It may not have been a long life, and it may not be the one any of them deserve, but Grantaire finds he doesn’t mind so much.

 ---

After that, there’s a gap in his memories.

It’s all still there, he knows, lingering at the back of his mind, if he dares try hard enough to remember them. But those lives are just more of the same, more of bickering and loving and dying too young.

The next life he remembers is memorable because they win.

The Romanian Peasants’ Revolt, it later grew to be called. In this life, Enjolras is rich, as always. Most of the Amis are, it would seem. Only Grantaire, Feuilly, and Jehan are poor, but Jehan’s family at least owns a little land, and Feuilly’s not even from the country. But Grantaire, he’s a peasant, he’s what Enjolras is fighting for, and that’s what draws them together. The Les Amis—in this life, as with all but the first, they go by a different name, but they will always be the Les Amis to him, always—steal food from the rich landowners whose land so many work and deliver them to the poor; like a band of Robin Hoods.

When Enjolras arrives at his poor excuse for a house, there’s a spark of recognition in his beautiful eyes, and the food ends up forgotten on the ground. If he dares look back on it, he really should have figured it out, figured how their story would go; there were so many clues that night, so much hesitance in every move. As if Enjolras was operating on muscle memory, but not fully formed memories.

It takes so little time for Grantaire to join the cause, and he does so just in time. Rebellion sweeps through the nation, the oppressed rising up with surprising speed and ferocity, and the Amis once again find themselves at the center of it all. At first, it seems like they’ve made their point, like the government has actually listened. The fighting stops in their area, and they celebrate like nothing Grantaire has ever seen before. They have won.

Two days pass.

Then the soldiers arrive.

It’s a massacre. The entire town is wiped out.

It’s the first time Enjolras and Grantaire die apart, the first time they are further than an arm’s length away from each other in their final moments.

It won’t be the last.

 ---

He revels in the fact that no death can surprise him after that, and that’s what makes the next life bearable. Once again, they’re in America, and the Prohibition is in full swing. It takes longer than ever before for Grantaire to find anyone from the Amis outside of Bahorel, who remembers just as much of their past as he does. Neither of them have the crutch of alcohol to help them cope this time, so instead they spend their days doing whatever they can to get by, to make money, to not drown in the memories from so many lives that swirl around their minds at any given time.

In a time like this, Grantaire knows with complete certainty he will meet Enjolras again. A government exercising too much power? A government trying to make people’s every decision for them? As much as Enjolras is against alcohol on principle, the entire situation is right up Apollo’s ally. When they do meet, though, it’s in an underground bar that Grantaire knows Courfeyrac dragged him to the minute he spots the blonde curls he knows so well.

Their eyes meet, and when it takes a moment for the recognition to light up his eyes, a moment where Courfeyrac has already latched onto him, Grantaire knows something is horribly wrong.

They don’t fall into bed that night, not in the sense one would think. Instead, they talk. Enjolras remembers, it would seem. Well enough to get by, at least. It took some time, but it seems at least the more recent lives are still lurking around the golden god’s brilliant mind.

Grantaire assumes as much, at least, as the tears pour down their cheeks late at night because _I wasn’t there when you died._

What Grantaire doesn’t dare mention is how terrified he is. How the tears that stain his cheeks and labor his breaths are also ones of apprehension. He tries to tell himself he’s being ridiculous, that this is a fluke. He knows it’s not.

Enjolras is forgetting him.

Later on, when they’re caught by the police, Grantaire takes solace in the fact that, this time, they die together once again. This time, they are the ones ending their own lives. It’s the first time either of them have chosen how they die, and, even if they were pressured into doing it by the fear of prison and simply being caught, it’s just one of many changes that Grantaire fears he is not ready for.

 ---

The next time they meet, all of Grantaire’s fears are confirmed.

Somehow, they skipped World War II. At first, Grantaire believes he’s just forgetting it, forgetting it like Enjolras is forgetting him. When he meets Courfeyrac and Jehan, though, he discovers with immense relief that he hasn’t forgotten, that they have indeed skipped to the Carnation Revolution, to 1974. It’s their first life in Portugal, and he can honestly say it’s a place he never thought he would end up. The world always seems to have bigger problems than the little island, and it just makes sense that Enjolras would end up in the biggest battle. But not this time.

This time, the recognition comes much quicker to Enjolras’s glittering eyes, and Grantaire believes for a second that everything will be fine, that their most recent reincarnation was just a slip-up in the universe. It isn’t until they’re lying in bed sated and sleepy that it all crashes down.

“I remember it all,” Enjolras says, “all of the Prohibition. How we died. How we met.”

“And before that?”

The pure confusion on Enjolras’s face ties Grantaire’s stomach in knots that never truly untie.

They almost live, this time. The Revolution itself is bloodless, the overthrow so smooth it seems they’ll finally have a chance to grow old, all of them, a chance to live out their lives for the very first time. But while the government has been overthrown, not all of their supporters have disappeared, and when Grantaire and Enjolras die hand in hand just like those first two lives, Grantaire wants to cry because, yes, they have that, but he’d rather Enjolras have his memories back.

 ---

When the Berlin Wall falls and Grantaire has not yet found Enjolras, he initially fears he never will.

The week following is filled with more alcohol than he could possibly consume safely, both to cope and in celebration, that he himself nearly does not recognize Enjolras when he sees him. But he could never pass him by, no matter how addled his mind may be. Those golden curls, that porcelain skin, those passionate eyes; how could he ever forget a single detail?

Enjolras is just as drunk as he is, if not more so, and this is the only solace Grantaire can cling to in the aftermath of it all. There are no words exchanged, just heated kisses and the best sex Grantaire has had in any life, he believes, and he should have known then and there that this was it, this was the last good thing they could possibly have, because every single life has been cruel and short and worse than the one before, but Grantaire is painfully optimistic underneath all of his cynicism when it comes to this, when it comes to Enjolras and their love that has transcended lifetimes.

He wakes up the next morning to an empty bed.

He dies in a car accident the very next day.

On the other side of the city, Enjolras feels as if a part of him is dying too, though he knows not why. For some reason, all he can think of is a face, one he faintly remembers from a drunken tryst the other night. It is a good thing Grantaire could not read his mind, it would seem, for the lack of recollection, for the simply muscle memory but nothing solid that remained would have crushed him more than any car crash ever could. When Enjolras dies less than a year later, coincidentally—or not—in a car accident as well, he does so with the name of a lover who once meant so, so much to him on his lips.

 ---

New York City. 2013. There is no war to be fought this time, but there’s plenty to stand for. It’s the beginning of something entirely new for all of the Les Amis. With there being so little a chance of Enjolras dying in this incarnation, Grantaire dares hope one last time for something good, for just one miracle.

Then they meet.

No light of recognition strikes the cold and calculating eyes of his fearless leader.

They’re at a protest that quickly takes a turn for the worst, and, well, if Grantaire jumps in front of a bullet going straight towards Enjolras, it really shouldn’t surprise anyone. When Enjolras only sees it as a stranger saving his life out of the kindness of his heart, well, perhaps it is for the better that Grantaire does not have to suffer anymore.

When Grantaire wakes up, he is not in another country. He is not in another time. He is not in another body. This time, he is in what must be heaven, for it’s so much better than life ever was. Here, he never craves the alcohol that seldom left his system, nor the drugs he took during those devastating last few lives. The depression that plagued him from the very beginning, from France, until the bitter end, it’s vanished completely, leaving him with something that can’t be called contentment but seems pretty close.

And Enjolras? Enjolras _wins._ It may not be a war, but it’s the hardest he ever fought, and it paid off, it finally, finally paid off. Most of his life is spent on the war for equality, but, for once, it is a long one. At the ripe old age of eighty, he passes away in his sleep, a legacy of success and social reform and _good_ left in his wake.

 ---

Although they are no longer alive, technically, death is easily the best ‘life’ they ever lived by far.

It doesn’t take long for them to find each other, once Enjolras enters the eternal nothingness of the afterlife. They’re in the same bodies they possessed way back in France, that first time, except in this case, they are more ethereal and yet somehow more permanent. The knowledge that they have forever to love and to memorize each other over and over again in every different way adds a spring to their step and an effortlessness to their smile.

When the rest of the Amis join them a few years later, it makes everything seem worth it; all the heartbreak and death and blood and pain.

Maybe they didn’t have enough lives together, but in death, they had each other, and, in the end, that was enough.

FIN


End file.
